If you listen hard enough these days, you can hear the trees whispering: Al Gore, Al Gore …

Is he our man? And if he can’t do it, then who out there can? Hillary? Meh, fuggedaboutit. John Kerry? Next. Mark Warner? Only if your glass reads half-full and not half-defensive capitulation. It’s not a field of good options for the Democrats in 2008, and the idea of a McCain presidency, which at one point may have been tolerable, even desirable, seems to be growing more and more gangrenous everyday; at the rate he’s been feeling out the rightwing nutjob fringes, the ’straight-talking’ liberal centrists and moderate Republicans will have to amputate, and soon.

I’ve been talking to friends who have begun getting excited about a possible return for Gore into the fray. In the last six years, freed from the cultural constraints of beltway politesse, Gore has been aggressively outspoken in his views ranging from the Iraq war to the environment to the sorry state of contemporary journalism, and has conveyed a charisma and ferocity that was entirely missing from his milquetoast 2000 run. Now, do his newly forged lefty credentials translate into a viable presidential run? That’s hard to say, but the question is not as opaque as it was in the fall of 2004; since then an unceasing accumulation of Republican-branded bad news has fermented into a thoroughly toxic stew for the GOP that has resonance not just for the 2006 midterms, but quite possibly well beyond. Iraq, Katrina, Abramoff, global warming (and the Bush administration’s reluctance to deal with it), and Bush himself’s southbound approval ratings have created buoyant conditions for an electable Democratic insurgent, a scenario which was unthinkable when Kerry and Edwards took their turns on the sacrificial pyre of ‘domestic insecurity’ and ‘out-of-touch liberal’ two short years ago.

So then the question is: who can stake a liberal position on good faith, who a) doesn’t have a contradictory or ambiguous record having signed on to the Iraqi misadventure in 2002, who b) has the name-recognition and gravitas to not easily get called out on opportunism or so-called coastal liberal detachment, and who c) is actually experienced enough in administration and statecraft to deflect charges of inadequacy and softness? Well, arguably, Al Gore.

This intriguing piece in The American Prospect about the ‘new new Gore’ is a really thoughtful primer for the fanboy and the skeptic alike. I recommend it mightily.

His official line, btw, is that he’s out of the running. His non-official 2008 netroots site is here. And later this summer, Gore’s documentary film about global climate collapse An Inconvenient Truth (produced by the smart and progressive Participant Productions, production company for Good Night, Good Luck and Syriana) will be released.